Marketing Item

A road novel should have its very own transportation. Right? To support the Boston to Austin Level3 Reunited Tour for Hilary Weisman Graham’s YA novel Reunited, Curious City created a pop-up photo booth that allows you to be in the PeaPod, the book’s infamous vintage VW van. The photo booth was inaugurated at Hilary’s launch party with all the guests crowding in to wave out the front window. The spare tire happens to sport the national offer to text for free book chapters and band MP3s. As photos of the booth are shared on those mighty social...

Events are tricky. How to make the event experiential enough that readers want to share the event and book with friends and how to give them something to easily share with those friends. With the launch party for Mercy: The Last New England Vampire we nailed it on both fronts by recycling the dead. We invited back the lovely and haunting Emily who played (the dead) Mercy in the book trailer to stand beside a reproduction of her gravestone. We then we dared readers from the mist and fog covered cemetery launch party to step beside Mercy for a rather grave photo. See...

We could not resist merging our client Sarah L. Thomson’s novel about the true 1892 exhumation and heart burning of an accused 19-year-old vampire with the popular tattoo graphic of a burning heart. Yes, the giveaway for this book IS a temporary tattoo. Thanks to illustrator/designer Marty Braun for this beauty. Where can you sink your fangs into one? At the launch party for Mercy: The Last New England Vampire (Islandport Press) on 10/1/11 in Portland, Maine or ask for one (or more if you are a librarian) to be mailed to you here. Share...

Mercy, the last New England vampire, was pulled forcibly from her tomb in 1892. The teen novel about this horrific true incident and the present-day girl who uncovers it, was launched at the Eastern Cemetery in Portland, Maine under the appropriate cover of thick fog and gray drizzle. Per your usual event, the author, Sarah L. Thomson read and signed her novel… …but she did so while the ghost of Mercy walked the graveyard beyond her. Some readers were able to catch Mercy on film and… …to take on the visage of the dead...

Every time you do an event (be it a signing or a launch party) make sure you have something to give to everyone, regardless of whether they buy or not. And, of course, brand it. Do you have to go to one of those fancy imprinting companies? Perhaps… But with an Avery label and a bit of lay out patience, you can make a very cheap giveaway. Jamie Hogan’s Seven Days of Daisy opens with Daisy gazing through a red magnifying glass. What a better giveaway for a book about summer exploration. Magnifying glasses? Yup. A quarter at U.S. Toy. Add a label and we...

Remember the days when there were SO many posters produced by publishers for children’s books? I was just recalling how my wonderful boss at the Wheaton College Library, Jean Callahan, would come back from ALA with armloads. She would take little student me into her office and allow me to secret them away to line my dorm room walls. That, of course, is the trouble with creating a poster for a book–the posters often do not end up places where they will advertise the book. But what did I just do? I created a poster for a children’s book. It is,...